Today, there is to be a new type of hostage exchange. Four dead hostages are to be returned to Israel. In return, Israel will release all the women and children it has detained without charge since 8th October 2023, provided that they were “not involved in the fighting.”
In the original ceasefire plan, the two sides were to exchange dead bodies after all the living Israeli hostages had been redeemed. The arithmetic shows that for Israel to redeem all the hostages including male soldiers, it would have to release every Palestinian prisoner. So the dead body exchange would have taken place after all the captives on both sides had been released.
But Israel wants its dead hostages back now. And Hamas is willing to trade.
The next exchange of living captives will take place on Saturday as planned. So the repatriation of the dead is now taking place alongside the release of the living, rather than being delayed until all the living have been released. And the currency of the deal has changed. Instead of exchanging dead bodies for dead bodies, they are now exchanging dead bodies for live ones.
It is difficult to imagine a more revolting trade. But why is it happening? Why has the plan changed?
Valuing the dead
Both sides in the long-running Israeli-Palestinian conflict stockpile dead bodies to use as bargaining chips- yes, I know, this is utterly gruesome, but it’s how they roll.
In addition to the hostages known to have died or been killed in the current conflict, militant Palestinian groups are holding bodies of dead Israeli soldiers from earlier conflicts. Where they are keeping them (and what condition the bodies are in) is anyone’s guess.
Israel routinely retains the bodies of Palestinians it has killed, both militants and civilians, including children. It also withholds the bodies of Palestinians who have died in its notorious prisons. The bodies are in numbered graves in closed military cemeteries – what Palestinians call “cemeteries of numbers” – or in freezers in the National Centre of Forensic Medicine in Tel Aviv. In 2019, Israel’s High Court approved the holding of Palestinian bodies as bargaining chips. However, Israel doesn’t seem to have done much bargaining: some of the bodies date back to the 1967 war.
As with living hostages, Israel’s bargaining position for dead bodies is weak. Israel holds far more dead Palestinians than Palestinian groups do dead Israelis, and it is extremely sentimental about its own dead bodies. The younger the deceased was at the time of death, the more outraged Israeli society is about it, and thus the more valuable the body. So Palestinian militant groups can drive hard bargains for return of, for example, the remains of babies and toddlers. Had the ceasefire agreement proceeded as originally planned, Israel would have had to return a very large number of dead Palestinians to their loved ones in order to bring the bodies of Kfir and Ariel Bibas back to their grieving father.
But now, the two sides have brought forward the repatriation of dead bodies. Instead of waiting until all live hostages have been released, Israel wants high-status dead hostages such as the Bibas kids back now. Hamas, ever happy to do repugnant business if it serves its interests, has accommodated Israel’s desire – at a price. Instead of repatriating dead bodies, Israel will redeem its dead hostages by releasing Palestinian women and children currently held in its prisons.
Israeli prisons hold Palestinians from all parts of the Occupied Territories including Gaza. Many have never been charged with any offence – they are held under “administrative detention,” a form of internment which can last for years. The number of Palestinians interned without charge has rocketed since the attacks on 7th October 2023. According to the human rights organisation Addameer, Israel is currently holding 10,000 political prisoners, of whom 3,369 people are in administrative detention. The vast majority are men: Adameer says there are 365 children and 15 women. Nearly 2,000 prisoners are from Gaza.
The women and children Israel proposes to release are exclusively from Gaza and are not suspected of terrorist offences. In short, they are innocent people that Israel abducted and held captive in violation of international law. There’s a word for such people. It begins with “h”.
We don’t know how many there are are. Israel’s offer to release all of them sounds generous, but once you whittle down the numbers, it could merely amount to a few dozen people.
And in return, Hamas will release four high-status dead hostages. Hamas has confirmed that the four include the Bibas family.
Valuing the living
So, are the living more valuable than the dead? Let’s look at what Israel is paying for the release of its living hostages. .
During the current ceasefire, hostage releases have followed the pattern I identified in my earlier discussion of hostage economics. Palestinian prisoners are the currency in which Israel must pay Hamas’s ransom demand. The higher the value that Israel places on a hostage, the more Palestinian prisoners it must release to ransom them.
In the current ceasefire, there have been six hostage releases so far. The ransom price has risen with every release:
19th January: three Israeli non-military female hostages in return for 90 Palestinian prisoners
25th January: four Israeli female soldiers in return for 200 Palestinian prisoners
30th January: one Israeli female soldier, two non-military Israeli hostages (one male, one female) and five Thai nationals, in return for 110 Palestinian prisoners.
1st February: three Israeli non-military male hostages in return for 183 Palestinian prisoners
8th February: three Israeli non-military male hostages in return for 183 Palestinian prisoners
15th February: three dual-national non-military male hostages in return for 369 Palestinian prisoners.
Doing the arithmetic gives us the following prices:
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for each Israeli civilian female hostage, 30 Palestinians
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for each Israeli female soldier, 50 Palestinians
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for each Israeli elderly male hostage, 30 Palestinians
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for each Israeli civilian male hostage of fighting age, 61 Palestinians
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for each dual-national civilian male hostage of fighting age, 123 Palestinians.
These prices are consistent with the hierarchy of value in hostage economics. Civilian women and elderly men are worth less than female soldiers, and female soldiers are worth less than military-age men whether or not those men are currently in service with the IDF. We should remember that many military-age Israelis are IDF reservists.
Guest workers, it seems, are worthless. Israel paid nothing for the release of the five Thai hostages. Indeed they weren’t even included in the deal. Hamas appears to have included them as an unsolicited bonus, perhaps because it sees no benefit from a quarrel with Thailand.
Dual nationals are worth more than Israelis. Or rather, an American-Israeli dual national is worth more. Much more. The three dual nationals released on 15th February were, respectively, American-Israeli, Russian-Israeli and Argentinian-Israeli. Russia says Hamas included their dual national in the hostage release as a gesture of goodwill and no ransom was demanded. Argentina has said nothing, but it seems unlikely that Israel paid much for its dual national either. So 369 Palestinians, including 23 serving life sentences, may have been the ransom price of an American-Israeli citizen who works for Amazon.
So far, no male soldiers have been released. The redemption price for those is much higher than for female soldiers or civilians. For Gilad Shalit, the IDF soldier released in 2011, the price was 1,000 Palestinians, including Yahya Sinwar, who went on to become leader of Hamas and architect of the attack on 7th October 2023. Applying the same arithmetic to the present conflict shows that redeeming all the male soldiers held by Palestinian militant groups would cost Israel every Palestinian prisoner it holds, including the most dangerous. No wonder Israel is hoovering up Palestinians in the West Bank. It needs all the prisoners it can get.
Interestingly, there isn’t a hierarchy of value among Palestinian prisoners. You’d think that Israel would drive a harder bargain for high-profile prisoners and those serving long sentences, but that’s not what the maths says. Rather than forcing Hamas to release more hostages, it is sending high-profile prisoners and those convicted of terrorist offences (including murder) into permanent exile, though at present it is not entirely clear where these people will end up. I wonder whether these people should even be included in the exchange calculus, since Israel clearly benefits from making them someone else’s problem.
Trading the living for the dead
If my estimate of the number of Palestinian women and children to be released is right, then the ransom prices paid so far show that living Israelis are worth more than dead ones, regardless of status.
Despite the absence of a value hierarchy for Palestinians, it seems likely that living Palestinians are similarly worth more than dead ones. Palestinian families grieve their dead just as Israelis do, and are every bit as anxious to bring them home and give them decent burial: but Hamas regards Palestinians who have died at the hands of the Jews as martyrs for the cause and therefore sanctified, regardless of what has happened to their bodies. So even a high-status dead Palestinian such as a militant commander is of lower value for exchange purposes than a living Palestinian woman.
At first glance, the decision to bring forward the repatriation of dead hostages is costly for Israel, since it forces it to give up more valuable living Palestinians. However, from Israel’s point of view, living Palestinians are far more expensive than dead ones: they must be provided with the basic essentials of life, and they present a considerable security risk. Dead bodies don’t need food and water, and they don’t try to escape. Indeed, allowing dead bodies to degrade is to Israel’s advantage, since putrefaction conceals the cause of death and hides the marks of starvation and torture.
Furthermore, had the hostage exchange proceeded as originally planned, Israel would have had to release these women and children anyway. So there is no cost to Israel. Indeed, there is a slight advantage, since it brings forward the release date and hence reduces the cost of maintaining them.
Even if Israel releases more living Palestinians than the number of dead ones it would have returned under the original plan, it still has an advantage. It gets its dead back more quickly and it reduces the number of Palestinian prisoners it has to maintain. And it can always hoover up more Palestinians if it needs them for subsequent exchanges.
Why has Hamas agreed to this exchange?
It is obvious how Israel benefits from this gruesome trade. But why is Hamas cooperating? On the face of it, it’s a bad trade for them. They could hold out for the release of a much larger number of dead Palestinians in due course, knowing that Israel will eventually have to release the women and children anyway.
At this point the usual suspects will no doubt rail against Hamas’s callousness, and those more sympathetic to Hamas might say it has nothing more to gain by keeping the bodies so is giving them up as a humanitarian gesture. But Hamas’s leaders are not stupid. They won’t give Israel anything unless there is some benefit for Hamas and its cause. So what’s in it for Hamas?
The obvious explanation is that Hamas is anticipating the premature end of the ceasefire and resumption of war. It is recruiting and regrouping, and there are reports that it is rebuilding tunnels in preparation for a renewed Israeli offensive. Bringing forward the release of the bodies ensures the release of as many Palestinian prisoners as possible, and in particular the innocent women and children who should never have been imprisoned.
Hamas may also be trying to avoid giving Israel an excuse to terminate the ceasefire prematurely. Israel claims the “dead for living” exchange is in a previously unreported clause of the ceasefire agreement. It has provided no evidence for this, and many people are sceptical that such a clause exists. But if Hamas does not comply with the terms of this new clause, Israel will take it as a ceasefire violation.
Israel itself has repeatedly violated the ceasefire terms, apparently to provoke Hamas into retaliating in the hope of creating an excuse to terminate the ceasefire prematurely. Hamas has generally resisted the urge to retaliate, but it did threaten not to proceed with a hostage release if Israel continued to obstruct the entry of humanitarian aid into the Gaza Strip. This sparked a threat from the US’s President Trump that “all hell would break loose” if Hamas didn’t release all the hostages. Fortunately, cooler heads prevailed: Israel loosened the blockade somewhat (though it is still not complying fully with the ceasefire terms), and the hostage exchange went ahead as planned.
But the ceasefire is not going to last much longer. Phase 2 negotiations were due to start four days ago but have not yet begun. And President Trump’s green light to Netanyahu to ethnically cleanse the entire Gaza Strip arguably renders the negotiations moot. All Israel needs to do is sacrifice its remaining hostages, and it can complete the job it started in 1967.
Would Israel sacrifice the hostages to claim its prize? Hamas, it seems, has decided to force the issue. Yesterday, it offered to release all the hostages, including male soldiers, in return for Israel ending the war.
The brutal end game
This changes the exchange calculus. The hostages are still valued in Palestinian lives, but as a group, not individually. And their value is no longer measured against the lives of the 10,000 or so Palestinians in Israeli jails, but against the lives of the two million people struggling for survival in Gaza. Hamas has massively ramped up the price.
Netanyahu has told his right wing that he intends to resume the war. They will bring down his government if he reneges on this promise. So he now faces a choice: sacrifice the hostages, or lose his premiership. It is not difficult to imagine what he will choose.
If Netanyahu sacrifices the hostages to keep himself in power, then neither Hamas nor the IDF will have any incentive even to keep them alive, let alone release them. Their lives will be toast. Netanyahu can reduce the value of even the most valuable hostages to zero, simply by deciding their lives are not worth saving.
Hostage economics is a brutal game, and never more so than when it nears its end.
Related reading:
A financial view of labour markets
Image of Hostages Square by Oren Rozen, CC BY-SA 4.0
